Absolutely. It's a good question.
Budgets are future-oriented information and therefore the basis on which they're prepared is built on what we call assumptions. Depending on those assumptions, you can have some very significant results.
I know you have a CMA, and therefore you know that one of the things management uses is the cost analysis--the differences between budget and actual, on a daily basis, to be able to say this didn't go the way we planned, we have to correct it, or we made more or less. It's part of the management tools.
But I'm not a hundred percent sure that I would say budgets have the same elevation in business that they do in government. If you look at government, you tend to see that the single financial document that is focused upon by the media, by government itself, or by declarations, happens to focus on the budget. Public accounts don't get the same level of scrutiny or the same level of interest from everybody else.
The reverse is true in commerce. The budgets are used as a management tool to be able to manage the company on a day-to-day basis, but they don't publish them. They don't have to account for differences, look at variances, or look at variance analysis. The accountability is a little different.
In developing our standards for the public sector, we've said accountability is much more important in the public sector. The best way to get accountability in the public sector is to take the budget and say you're going to be accountable by explaining what the differences are and what actually happened. It's a year later, but it is still going to be a good accountability report.